Darkness and Light: Joseph Conrad, Stefan Zweig and Chess

I have mentioned before that the inspiration underpinning both the style and content of my chess columns for TheArticle derives to a certain extent from the book, The King, written by the Dutch Grandmaster Jan Hein Donner. His discursive columns, masterpieces of chess related prose, were penned during the period when his world had shrunk to just one small room in a care home, after he had been blasted, and partially blinded, by a stroke.

A further influence was the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. His classic, Sternstunden der Menschheit (Stellar Moments of Humanity), led me to develop the theme of my columns for TheArticle: what might be called “Sternstunden der Schachheit”, or “Stellar moments of Chess”. 

Zweig, a gourmet of things intellectual, was evidently fascinated by chess, a fascination which may be observed from his chess-centred Schachnovelle. Usually translated as The Royal Game, this novella reconstructs the internal mental activity of playing chess as a defensive rampart against the very real slings and arrows of the external world, in this case the Nazi torturers tormenting the chief protagonist, Dr B. 

Another writer fascinated by chess, whose literary career partly intersected with that of Zweig during the first quarter of the twentieth century, was the enigmatic Anglo-Polish merchant naval officer, Joseph Conrad. This Polish-speaking subject of the the Russian Tsars, whose empire incorporated Poland at that time, rose to become one of the most impressively enduring craftsmen of the English novel in the late 19th and early 20th century. Conrad only started to learn English at the relatively late age of twenty and his resonant unfamiliarity with his adopted tongue lends a startlingly original, if somewhat stilted, edge to his prose style. 

To me, Zweig and Conrad have always seemed very much like light, as expressed in Zweig’s perennial optimism and belief in humanity, contrasted with Conrad’s exploration of the darkness concealed in the recesses of the human soul. Ironically, though, it was Zweig who committed suicide, while a suicide attempt by the young Conrad went hopelessly wrong and he lived to a ripe old age in rural Kent, just outside Canterbury, in his chosen country. One can almost detect W.S. Gilbert’s jingoistic refrain from his nautical operetta, HMS Pinafore in the background: “in spite of all temptations, to belong to other nations, he is an Englishman…” And so Conrad was, by 1889, having put the Russian-ruled Poland of his youth well behind him. 

Devotees of Grand Guignol space opera will recognise Nostromo, the title of one of Conrad’s most celebrated novels, and also the name of the gigantic space vessel in the intergalactic horror film Alien. The two, book and spaceship, are linked by the concept of cargo. In Conrad’s hands the eponymous anti-hero Nostromo (derived from the Italian, meaning our man) deliberately conceals a stolen cargo of silver, which turns out to be lethal for him. The movie sees the Nostromo taking on board, as inadvertent cargo, an equally lethal, quasi-indestructible, alien life form, which first throttles, then injects and finally, in its embryonic new life format, bursts forth from the flesh of its paralysed victim, and then begins to hunt down the Nostromo’s crew. 

As testimony to his enduring relevance, another notable Conrad title, The Secret Agent, offers frightening insight into the black heartlessness of late 19th century urban terrorism. The novel was later adapted as a cliffhanging thriller,  Sabotage (1936) directed by Alfred Hitchcock. 

One scene from that film was shot at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, still a popular restaurant. In fiction it was patronised by Sherlock Holmes, and in real life it was the haunt of such Victorian chess luminaries as Howard Staunton and Thomas Henry Buckle (see my previous column ), thereby becoming the traditional home of British chess.

In 1979 Conrad’s most famous novel,  Heart of Darkness,  was adapted by Francis Ford Coppola into the napalm-singed movie Apocalypse Now . With its helicopter gunships soaring to the theme of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”, and the bloated Marlon Brando as Conrad’s murderous Kurtz, lurking at the horrific epicentre of the primeval jungle, Apocalypse Now garnered the prestigious Palme d’Or, plus no fewer than eight Oscar nominations.

In Conrad’s original novel, we are introduced to the naval Captain Marlow, who tracks down Kurtz. Marlow reappears playing chess in Conrad’s novel  Chance , and it is widely believed that Conrad modelled Marlow on himself. One Archibald Dukes, a medical officer serving on the Torrens , sailing from the UK to Australia in 1891-1893, records playing chess with the Polish first mate (Conrad himself). Having blundered away his queen, the most powerful piece on the board, the doctor tried to resign, but Conrad would have none of that and insisted on continuing to the inevitable checkmate. 

In the Canterbury museum The Kit, one can still observe two of Conrad’s chess sets and a book by the chess genius Capablanca, My Chess Career , published by Bell and Hyman in 1920 and signed by Conrad himself. Conrad had pasted in some newspaper chess columns over the advertisements at the back of this evidently beloved book. Among other Conrad memorabilia, there is also Howard Staunton’s  Chess-Player’s Companion , a small homage to the Shakespearean scholar and the only Englishman ever to have been considered as World Champion.   

Conrad also used chess for unorthodox but imaginative purposes. In the biography  My Father , written by his son Borys, the story is related of the chess code developed by Conrad during the First World War: 

“When I re-joined him he said: ‘Look here, Boy, in case you should get yourself “knocked in the head” I should at least like to know where your remains are disposed of out there. He then explained a code he had devised by means of which I could let him know approximately what part of the front I was on, without running foul of the censor. Many years before he had taught me to play chess and he now gave me a pocket chess set and said that we would play games by post. Certain moves, not relating to the games in hand would, when used by me, indicate squares which he had ruled on his war map. Then he escorted me to my car, shook me vigorously by the hand and said: ‘Be off now, Boy — Bless you.’ This was in November 1915.”

Conrad’s second son, John, also relates in his memoir  Times Remembered , how his father used to summon him to play chess in the middle of the night, at moments when his reserves of literary energy were flagging:  

“People have said when I have told them of this recollection that my father was being rather selfish in getting me out of bed, but it never struck me in this way. I was flattered that he should ask me to get up and play chess with him in the ‘small hours’. There was no compulsion about it but there was a special kind of novelty in sharing the shadows surrounding the pool of light on the chessboard, a silent communion punctuated by the occasional click as a move was made or a ‘check’ called. I realised fairly soon that the mental effort of playing chess helped my father to realign his thoughts so as to overcome an ‘impasse’ for the arrangement of words or the construction of a phrase to convey some subtle meaning.”

No actual games of chess played by Conrad (or Zweig) have come down to us. But we do know that Conrad admired Capablanca, who won the World Chess Championship in 1921.

John Conrad recalls that his father decided to take him in hand and improve his son’s game, so two or three times a week after dinner they got out the chessmen and board and spent a couple of hours playing through the games in Capablanca’s book. Father and son played through every game in the book, with Joseph reading out the moves, and stopping where Capablanca had made a comment, so that they could write down their own observations.

“At the end we would compare notes and argue over various alternative moves. My father‘s comments were very similar to those in the book but sometimes there were wide divergencies of viewpoint and we would play the variations through, making notes of our reasons for our moves.”  

In lieu of a game by either of the two literary giants, here is a link to an elegant Capablanca masterpiece , which, crowned by a queen sacrifice to force checkmate, was instrumental in his victory over Emanuel Lasker in the 1921 World Championship Match in Havana.